


To Strive, To Seek, To Find (And Not To Yield)

by geoclaire



Category: Prison Break
Genre: Drugs/drug use, F/M, POV Second Person, Sex, Violence, dark themes, disturbing imagery, please read warnings, repost, this may fuck you up
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-04-29
Updated: 2015-04-29
Packaged: 2018-03-26 06:57:33
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,533
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3841399
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/geoclaire/pseuds/geoclaire
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>You're not there. You're not. Michael is here, Michael and a big bed and a clean room and he'd fed you and helped pick out the old stitches in your arm. He wouldn't cut your hair for you, but he'd put careful bandages around the torn skin of your wrists and arms, treated the long gouge down your side. He'd had a full medical kit waiting for you, and you couldn't face acknowledging why.</p><p>(This is a repost to archive a fic I wrote in 2008)</p>
            </blockquote>





	To Strive, To Seek, To Find (And Not To Yield)

**Author's Note:**

> This was written before the release of S4 and contains some inaccuracies that arose after that season was shown.
> 
> Also, this goes to some dark places. Trigger warning, various.

_Everything's beautiful_  
 _Every day's a holiday_  
 _The day you live without it._  
  
  
  
  
  
He had imagined her peaceful, hands tucked neatly between her knees when she slept. He had considered the possibility she'd still be angry, pushed beyond endurance by the many times he has managed to fail her, pictured her wanting to be alone. He has considered her distraught, confronted and bewildered by the many and varied turns her life has taken, agonized for having taken a life, grieving for her father. He has daydreamed of seeing her smile, of being the cause for her rich laugh; has considered wistfully the potential of ever seeing lust sparkle in her eyes. He has imagined her naked and demanding between the sheets, flushed with heat and sweat; has considered the many ways in which comfort can be offered. He has thought of consoling her.  
  
It has somehow never occurred to him that Sara would have nightmares.   
  
Michael doesn't know how this possibility never came to mind, and despises himself for having not. He knows what she has been through, how long she has struggled and how much she has suffered, and the many sacrifices she has made to come out alive. He knows what she has given up for him, for Lincoln, to keep them alive. He knows.  
  
And yet when she had come awake already rearing away from him in the dark warmth of their bed, crying and incoherent, it had thrown him completely. Enough so that his automatic response to reach for her in an attempt at comfort had only succeeded in panicking her further.   
  
Michael stills himself with a concerted effort, knotting his hands in the sheets rather than risking another unconsidered grasp for her. He's not sure he'll remember to control himself, not when he can already see shining tear tracks marking her face. She's shown clearly she's not in a headspace to be easily comforted, even as his usual form of comfort involves holding her. He's not even sure, given the blind and unseeing panic on her face, that she knows who he is or where they are. She probably doesn’t.   
  
He leans forward to her from his seated position on their bed, nowhere near close enough to touch her, but trying to show his concern in his posture. He makes his voice as gentle as he can.  
  
“Sara. Sara, what's going on?”  
  
It's neither original nor particularly helpful, but his own mind is still fogged with sleep, not assisted by his rough wakening or Sara's disorientation. “Sara, it's a dream. Just a dream,” he says as soothingly as he can manage. “No one is going to hurt you.”  
  
She stills, but there's still no clear indication that she believes him, even that she's paying attention. She doesn't look at him.   
  
  
  
  
  
  
You wake with their hands still around your neck, the rasp of duct tape on your wrists, skin red raw from where clothes have sat and rubbed for far too long. Kellerman's face, his stoic concern wiping water from your hair, twists into Stroker's, pinning you back against the door as the handle begins to turn, and becomes Gretchen's Jason's Toolman's, and there's too many people, pulling you different ways with your arms twisted back and your face forced down and old stitches tearing open and your increasingly lank hair being yanked at. Only there's no broken cabinet no shard of glass no syringe no hot iron no weaknesses this time and they pull you back into a room with a whirring saw and LJ screaming in the next room and this time there's no one -  
  
You come awake, you can't breathe, you need to be sick and it still hurts and there's sheets and something else on top of you and you shove away and there's someone's hand  _on you -_  
  
You don’t bother to scream. But you have your back to the wall so fast you don't even see who else is in the room and you can barely hear a thing above the sound of your own sobbing breathing.   
  
“Sara. Sara, what's going on?”  
  
You're not there. You're not. Michael is here, Michael and a big bed and a clean room and he'd fed you and helped pick out the old stitches in your arm. He wouldn't cut your hair for you, but he'd put careful bandages around the torn skin of your wrists and arms, treated the long gouge down your side. He'd had a full medical kit waiting for you, and you couldn't face acknowledging why.  
  
“Sara, it's a dream. Just a dream.”   
  
No, it wasn't.  
  
“No one is going to hurt you.”  
  
No. He had a full medical kit waiting for you. No one's going to hurt you.   
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
There's something faintly wrong in her posture, her face. Michael thinks she has come back to herself, somehow – he takes no credit – but there's something wrong, and he studies her restlessly, trying to figure it out. She's no longer cowering against the wall, but she's clearly not listening to him, maybe not even hearing him.   
  
Her eyes focus, and he wants to beam when they land briefly on him, but they don't stay. Her gaze flickers like a nervous bird, passing over him before settling on something narrowly beyond his perception. He forgets not to move, slides forward in his attempt to determine what her gaze rests upon, and sees the first aid kit she'd tossed into a corner earlier on.  
  
He jack-knifes out of bed so fast that he narrowly intercepts her concerted pounce for the kit, completely and utterly careless of his earlier attempts to not frighten her. He grabs at her hands before she can shove past him, looks away for the briefest of seconds to kick the kit as far and as hard as he can, and then suddenly she's thrashing and scratching and _fighting_  him.   
  
Pure shock leaves him still for a moment, unable to believe that Sara –  _Sara_  – is fighting him. He grabs pointlessly at her shoulder, his grip barely there, and snaps back to himself only when she bites him.   
  
It’s like falling. There’s a full second of sheer, uncomprehending shock before he even twigs to what’s happening, and only then can he react.  
  
He steps forward into her deliberately, forcing her to step back with his sheer presence, pinning her against the wall with his body. His unbloodied hand goes to hold her across the shoulders, grip well below her neck and throat, firm even as she thrashes against him. His fingers are slippery with what he recognises dimly is blood, but he finds her hand anyway, forcefully linking their fingers even as she shoves at him, panicking.   
  
“Sara, _don't._ ” He wishes he could do this better, be better, have better words, be able to be gentler. He wishes he'd never done any of this to her, wishes for her sake they'd never met. But she's fighting like a cornered cat, and he needs to make her stop. He leans further into her, still pinned against the wall, and tries again. “Sara,  _stop._  Please.”   
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
You hurt. Your breath is burning in your throat and you can't seem to stop sobbing, while his brief grip around your bandaged wrist has torn into raw flesh. The healing skin on your back is tight and pulling with every move and you want, so badly, to just climb out of this skin and this moment and just leave it behind. This never happened. Not to you.  
  
But shucking a skin isn't as easy as all that and there's only one other way you know of making all the pain stop. Morphine has never yet let you down. You've sought it for pain release, for relief, for relaxation, for oblivion. Morphine has never neglected to deliver what you needed; its only failing is that you cannot remain relaxed, released, oblivious; it does not keep you in that blinded safe space. Right now you're sure that's all you've ever wanted. To simply not know.  
  
And for whatever combination of good, loving, considerate reasons, Michael is not going to let you. Will bodily prevent you from getting to the drugs you need more than air. Has pinned you to the wall in his attempts to prevent your attaining them.   
  
You're aware vaguely that he's talking to you, that he has reasons and objectives and concerns. You're aware that he's trying, somehow, with what methods he has at his disposal, to take care of you. You're even aware of a distant sense of shame at what you've done to him, how you've acted, that you'll do all of this in some disturbed search for a simple chemical, but it isn't plain, isn't focused, isn't anywhere nearby. There's a taste of metal in your mouth and you swallow without understanding it. The only clear thing in your mind is a basic equation. You are in pain. You need morphine. That is what it comes down to.   
  
Anything else is gratuitous, pointless, waste.   
  
Somewhere you're already planning how to get around him; how to act to avoid interference, how to get to that fucking kit. Most of it’s just a bewildering, painful haze, but somewhere, there’s a plan.   
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
She doesn't react to the way he's pinning her, and somehow that scares him more than the lack of focus in her eyes or the way she doesn't seem to hear him. Shamed, he loosens his arm across her upper body, and abruptly she looks at him, and actually seems to see him.  
  
“Let me up, Michael.” Her voice is so even he feels as though the last five minutes haven't happened. He blinks, thrown, and lets go of her automatically, even as his brain screams that something isn't right. She's gone from total screaming abusive fighting to complete rationality in a matter of seconds, and it seems wrong even as he can't quite keep up with the alteration.   
  
And yet it appears valid. She takes a step off the wall and shrugs her shoulders in a stretch; reaches to pull back her hair from where it's hanging in her face. She hesitates momentarily at the sight of blood on her hand – a mix of hers and his, he realises, shamed at seeing her covered wrist covered further in crimson – then wipes it absently on her shirt.   
  
And that right there isn't Sara. He looks at the blood streaked down her otherwise pristine t shirt, at the way she's picking nervously at a strand of her hair, at the way her hands are shaking ever so slightly, and then the slightly too bright look in her eyes. He takes a solid grip on her forearm even as she starts to slip casually by him.   
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
You kiss him. If this is your plan, you didn’t know about it, didn’t even suspect, because it's the one low you've never sunk to in pursuit of morphine, but you kiss him hard, your hands coming up to hold the back of his head, and if it's part of some greater plan to get to a syringe of liquid dreams, he's never going to forgive you, but then you just might not forgive yourself.   
  
It doesn't matter. It doesn't. Not now, maybe not ever. He doesn't open his mouth, whether because of shock or because he doesn't trust your change of heart. It doesn't matter. You slide a hand up to angle his face more towards yours, and open your mouth against his. You're burning up, you're on fire, you're kissing him and now he's kissing you back, his tongue a solid pressure against your own, and maybe you meant this to distract him. Maybe it's working. But maybe he's distracting you instead.   
  
You kiss him hard, shoving yourself into his space now. You press against him, wanting the weight of his body against yours, pressing breasts and hips against the endless expanse of skin and ink. His legs are slightly spread, and you press yourself against his thigh as best as you can manage, beginning to grind against him. Lights are flashing behind your eyelids as you come closer, nausea somewhere in the background, and you go to slide your hands onto his ass and then you realise he's still holding onto your wrist.   
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
She jerks away from him like he's burned her, and Michael is too slow to respond. Sara is as far away as she can be with his hand still locked onto her wrist; dragging on skin that's only been further abused in the last hour. She yanks at her arm, trying to loosen his grip, and his heart seizes up at the look on her face.   
  
She's gone from terrified to morphine craving to lust to fear in the space of three minutes, and he knows that those things are all coming from the same place, are all coming from whatever it was that had her bolting out of sleep. But it's his hand on her wrist at the moment, him that's making her feel trapped once again, scaring her half out of her mind. He can barely believe he pinned her against a wall bare moments ago, when she'd been clearly terrified by him only seconds before that. He’s sick at the thought: he lets her wrist slip from his grasp.  
  
She tries to push past him again, and he catches her by the shoulders, trying to catch her eyes. She looks ill, exhausted, fearful, all at once. She looks at him, the way he's holding her, plainly considering her options, and says only, “I need it, Michael.”  
  
Her voice is low, balanced, reasonable. She's neither frantic nor violent, and she's still wanting the same thing. There are no more options, and he can only pray he’s done the right thing.  
  
“There's no morphine, Sara.” he searches her face, “I didn't think... I thought...” and faltering, he stops.  
  
Michael actually sees it as she crumples. Her face collapses, shoulders dropping, turning away from him, folding in on herself. “I need it,” she says simply, and then again, almost pleading, “Michael, I need it. Please.”  
  
“There's none.”  
  
Her face twists, he flinches, and she's yelling. “What, Michael? You thought I'd get out of there and everything would be fucking fine? You think everything is going to be okay just because I'm not tied to a chair now? You think I wouldn't need something? Or is that it, you're convinced I'm just going to fall back into a bottle because that's the easiest thing to do?” and it's worse when she's quiet. “I need it, Michael. I need it to make it all stop.”  
  
He can't answer even half of her accusations. He doesn't know if he thought she wouldn't want it at all or if he thought she'd want it half as badly as she does right now. He doesn't know if he, being responsible for her pain, has any right to have taken away the one thing she thinks can make it stop. He doesn't know what he would have done if she'd been truly, seriously hurt and needed painkillers more than oxygen. He only knows that the thought of Sara injecting one more needle of anything into herself scares him more than Padman and Abruzzi and T-Bag put together. He knows he can't bear to think of it.  
  
He wants to tell her this someday, wants to draw her close and tell her what the news of her overdose had done to him. He wants to tell her of his horror, grief, of his overwhelming responsibility. He wants to tell her how the image of her with a needle snapped off in her arm had haunted him until he’d thrown up out the back of the car next to some deserted railway. He wants to hold her against him and whisper this into her hair, the way he can scarcely bear to think of her with this or any other substance in her blood. He wants to spend his life sober with her.  
  
None of that is something she'll respond to right now. Her chest moves high with every breath and she's holding her head in her hands, looking ill again. And then she turns away from him, near bolting once more, but mercy of mercies, this time it's for the door and not the medical pack.   
  
He follows her down the hall to the bathroom, heart in his throat, and is greeted by the unmistakable sounds of her throwing up. He nudges the door open, slips inside, and crouches behind her to gather her hair back as she begins to retch again.  
  
  
Minutes later she goes still, and he pulls her back to lean against his body, her sweaty skin against his t shirt and bare arms. He gathers her to him, but she’s stiff in his arms, and he acknowledges her reaction is far from over, that she may be silent and sober but that this is not done.   
  
He lets loose her body and instead gathers her hair back, smoothing it with his hands until her posture begins to ease. Her hair is clean but uncombed, darkened by sweat, and he works slowly in his attempt to calm them both. She doesn’t flinch at his touching her, not when he gently unpicks knots and undoes tangles, nor when his fingers occasionally brush her face. Later, when he remembers her request that he cut away her long hair, when he learns the why, he’ll only be grateful at her letting him do this now.   
  
Her hair is soft and dried before he can work up the nerve to speak, and he holds off further, knowing this bare moment of respite will end as soon as he asks. He has to hold his breath.   
  
“Sara, tell me.”  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
You’re looking at your hands. They’re paler than you’re used to, at least where you’ve managed to scrub away all of the grime, but they’re still yours.   
  
They’re almost the only part of your body you can look at without seeing some record of what’s happened to you in the last month, the only part you can see and think about who you were before. Not who you were during. Or who you are now, who you might be becoming. If you just keep looking at your hands, you can remember all of the right things, all of the right times, and maybe this won’t have to be real. This won’t have to have happened.   
  
But you’re already shivering and the tiles are cold and this isn’t the only bathroom floor you’ve collapsed on. This isn’t the first time you’ve been a bundle of pain and nausea and nerves, retching up everything you’ve eaten inside a month and desperately craving morphine, or the nearest available substitute. This isn’t the first time you’ve done it bruised and bleeding, not even the first time you’ve done it with someone else sitting beside you. It’s not the first time you haven’t had the drugs you were sure you needed, not the first time you were denied them, not even the first time the pain and horror and grief of it all has made you think about wanting to die.   
  
  
It may possibly be the longest that someone has ever sat with you on a cold tile floor. You’re pretty sure it’s the first time someone has held your hair back while you puked. And it’s certainly the first time someone has held your shaking body against their chest while you silently sobbed and pretended you weren’t there, as well as the calmest that that’s ever made you.   
  
If you were eight, this would be the moment at which you’d pick up a strand of hair to chew. If you were eighteen, you’d close off and go back to bed. Twenty-one, and you’d start gnawing a wrist until it bled. And if you were twenty-five... well, you would have already dealt with this in your own particularly dysfunctional way.   
  
You’re twenty-nine. Michael has pulled your hair back, you’re already bleeding, you’ve bolted out of sleep once tonight, and there’s no way you’ll be getting your hands on morphine. It’s just possible that it’s about time to try this another way.   
  
When you try to talk, your mouth is so dry you find you can’t. You choke on the stomach acid rising in your throat and it’s somehow wrong that your body is somehow giving up on you when you’re finally – finally – trying.  
  
You feel Michael’s hands on your shoulders, then he’s twisting away from you, the warmth of his chest still against you even as he reaches to fill you a cup of water from the basin. He smooths your hair back from your face again before he hands the cup to you, and you drink gratefully, swallowing hard rather than pulling away from him again to spit up.   
  
You sit back against him, and his arms come around you to rest lightly on your knees where you’re crosslegged on the floor. You pick at your bandaged wrists with a thumbnail before wincing and stopping, and then you don’t have another excuse and maybe you’re actually going to have to tell him.   
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
He isn’t expecting her to talk, not really. She may not be physically running any more, but her stance is defensive, still curled in on herself, and he finds he’s expecting Sara to push him away again.   
  
Instead, her voice is the lowest he’s ever heard it. He struggles to hear the words, her voice angled away even as she sinks into him, her shoulders stiff and petrified but pressing against him. She’s made herself into the smallest ball of human he’s ever seen, and as the waves of her voice rock him, he thinks maybe she meant for it to be hard.   
  
Her story is concise to the point of being unemotional. She doesn’t emphasise anything any more than she can help it, she doesn’t linger, she doesn’t lay blame or reflect. She doesn’t tell him anything about how she feels, or felt; she tells him the absolute bare minimum.   
  
She tells him –  
  
_Waking up bewildered._  
  
While holding onto her own arms as though cold.  
  
_Her wrists rubbing raw._  
  
Her voice wavering, softer and lower.  
  
_The dark room._  
  
Curling into him, her body a classic foetal position.  
  
_A rough chair back digging repeatedly into her skin._  
  
Covering her face with her hands, like she can block out what she’s saying.  
  
_Her head yanked back, her long hair an easy target._  
  
A slow shake that she ignores, her skin tensed against him.  
  
_Pressed against a broken window._  
  
She tells him, as plainly as she can –  
  
_Gouging glass_  
  
LJ’s protesting voice  
  
A damaged door  
  
Raised voices over an escape attempt –  
  
Dragged from the room, LJ howling protests, her head clipping a wall, tape a blindfold the sound of a saw –  
  
And his hands tighten compulsively on her skin. There’s a rushing sound in his ears he doesn’t recognise, and he suddenly, violently understands her need to vomit. Where her unemotionality may have imposed some distance between herself and what she’s describing, he can see every iota of it. He bites down and tastes blood, can only think of hers, can only imagine her fear. Can only see her frightened face in that hellhole, where she was held and threatened and hurt to get to him. He’s closed his eyes at some point and he can see only black and red behind them. He thinks it’s appropriate. Darkness and her blood.   
  
She’s prising at his hands, and it takes him a minute to realise he’d holding onto her, forcefully preventing her moving away from him. A wave of self loathing hits him, and he loosens his grasp to let her go, shamed beyond words at what he’s done to her. Shamed beyond words that he’d done anything, at all, ever, to prevent her taking care of herself in whatever means she felt she needed. Shamed that he’s hung onto her in his own fear and desperation despite her own clear need to get away. His hands slip from her body, and he fully expects her to move away.  
  
He’s never ever seen someone move as fast as she does turning to him. Her hands are on his cheeks, her gaze meeting his, and she’s insisting, slowly and calmly, that he look at her. That he take deep breaths. That he calm down, let it fade away, let it slide. Insisting that she is here, now, not there, and it will be okay. He takes deep breaths, his gaze meeting hers, and waits until he stops feeling the crushing pressure around his chest.   
  
Her eyes search his, her concern for him now. “I don’t want to tell you the rest,” she says softly. She’s kneeling in front of him and has yet to stop shaking, but her concern is for him, and he thinks shakily that this isn’t how it’s supposed to be. She’s not supposed to be helping him. He’s half sick at her mere story, full of hate and desperate fear, barely alleviated by her presence alive and now, and he did not live this. He didn’t. And he has to at least hear it, he owes her that much.   
  
He clears his throat. “Tell me anyway,” he requests, and he doesn’t know what she sees in his face, but she only nods.   
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
You’ve never believed the adages, never thought a burden shared would relieve you of anything, but the sheer fact is that he’s clearly taking your every word as a blow, and you’re starting to believe that a month of isolation and pain has hurt more than you. You’re starting to believe that his fears for you, seemingly fulfilled, had terrorized him as much as almost wishing for them had terrified you. You’re starting to believe that helping him could be able to help you.  
  
You’re remembering that this is maybe why you’re who you are, were, are becoming. You’re remembering your profession. Empathy, sympathy, wisdom... and a will to first, do no harm. You’re remembering all psychologists are in therapy, and that you became a doctor because helping people did help you.  
  
You sit sideways across his lap, your side pressing uncomfortably into his shoulder. His arm comes up awkwardly across your back and you shudder momentarily before wilfully ignoring the pain he’s causing you, incidental as it is to the greater comfort. He’s waiting, and you press your face to the skin beneath his chin, both wanting this over and not wanting to say a word ever again.  
  
Ambivalence has always gotten to you, your own indecision haunting you many a time. You’re sure – if you’d thought – if you’d only acted – back in those days, if you’d simply committed to a course of action, rather than clung to a simple shield that let you not choose, or let you think the results of your choices didn’t matter, then maybe –   
  
Michael’s fingers graze your hip. And meeting his worried gaze, you let out a long, shaky breath, and you remember the first rule of healing is to bare the wound, acknowledge the full extent of an injury.   
  
And you speak. 

**Author's Note:**

> If you got through, I would really appreciate hearing from you - even now I remember how hard this fic was to write, emotionally hard, so I'd love anything you have to say.


End file.
